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Comment by whoknowsidont | Hacker News Reader

>The positive externalities are even more enormous

What do cars specifically positively provide? NOT including the positives that exists due to constructing infrastructure around that mode of transportation (artificial issues).

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Mobility; unfortunately, the public transit infrastructure in the US isn't that great and the sprawl means that cars have become a necessity.

Many areas simply can't be served efficiently by transit.

But this is not an inherent property of cars. It is only true because we invested all our transit dollars in highways. Cars are not inherently better and roads are not free. If we invest more in public transit we can reduce our need for cars.

Agree, but there's no political will and even if there was, it would take decades.

The first step is recognizing that cars are not ideal, and the second step is doing something about it. It’s not really a problem if it would take decades, as governments do tend to exist for decades and do plan accordingly.

But what we cannot do is pretend that cars are inherently superior, ignoring the unprecedented investment we made in highways to make that happen.

But it also isn’t the case that improvements will take decades. Maybe solving the problem completely would, but local governments can convert big dangerous streets in to walkable areas with safer bike transport in just a few years or less.

Solving the whole problem would take decades but then, governments do tend to deal in decades long plans when needed. If they’re ever going to launch new national rail projects, they’re going to need the public to recognize the value of alternatives to cars.

I'd like to know why you think cars are not inherently better as it seems very obvious that they are. That is why people overwhelmingly prefer to use them.

Only when infrastructure is built in a way that makes cars the most convenient option.

For a start, you have to store them at either end of your journey.

In places with decent public transportation people do not overwhelmingly prefer cars.

That sounds more like correlation than causation. Places with decent public transit are almost without exception very dense. Of course you wouldn't want to drive there. But if you live somewhere not as cramped, the experience is quite different.

No mode of transportation is truly inherently better since they all have unique strong and weak points, but...

Cars as the main method of transportation are obviously not good. They're too inefficient, no matter how you look at them. Manufacturing, infrastructure requirements, footprint per person, energy use, impact on human health and the environment. Cars suck.

People use whatever's most convenient and that's realistically going to be whatever the government has invested in the most.

The more car dependent a society, the more degenerate it is. This is hard to understand due to how car-infested most of the world is. Watch some videos by the Not Just Bikes channel on youtube [1] to see what the world could look like instead. Here's some poignant examples (direct links): [2][3][4][5].

And here's an obscure video that exemplifies what's wrong with car culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWi4gHm6pjQ. This is what a brainwashed society thinks like.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

[2]: https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc?t=464

[3]: https://youtu.be/AOc8ASeHYNw?t=204

[4]: https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw?t=361

[5]: https://youtu.be/c1l75QqRR48?t=290

People prefer a lot of things, it's almost never an indicator for what is better or worse. By most metrics, cars are a worse alternative. However, if the infrastructure has already been built around cars, it's hard to change that.

I very much doubt that cars are worse by most metrics, especially the metrics that count.

What metrics count? Cars are worse for the environment and health, the infrastructure is more expensive, accidents are worse, they cost more, and they create tremendous opportunity costs by creating car centric cities. One could go on.

They are more practicable/convenient because the infrastructure is already in place. Also, in more rural areas there might never be an alternative. That is pretty much it.

What supports the argument that people overwhelmingly prefer using cars over other transportation methods?

There was some study done in past decade that found that in the US only about 60% of 18 year olds had drivers licenses. Is that because of preference, or other factors?

Real estate located where it is possible to live without owning a car tends to be priced much higher than comparable real estate located where it is inconvenient to not own a car. Is this because people's preferences, a significant under supply relative to only a portion of the market's of demand, or other reasons?

> If we invest more in public transit we can reduce our need for cars.

No we can't. It takes 30 minutes to get to the airport for me by car - even during rush hour, or 1.5 hours by express bus.

Or for a friend of mine - 40 minutes by car, or 2 hours by train + bus.

Sorry, but there's no fix you can apply to public transport that will fix this.

Public transport is also more expensive - I took a group to Washington D.C. by metro - it cost around 5x as much as driving did (we drove the next day) including paying for parking. And the metro was far far slower.

Yeah public transit isn’t great for large groups. Fortunately, 90% of all trips that transit could replace are single occupancy vehicles.

There’s no reason that bus has to take 3x as long as driving. Reducing the number of stops to a strategic few could make it very comparable to driving, especially if busses are given their own traffic lane.

That has more to do with the middling state of public transit in the US than it does with public transit itself.

In Taiwan, when you land at TPE, there is an express MRT line that connects directly to Taipei Main Station. You can also hop on the High Speed Rail and connect to southern destinations. Bypasses all of the traffic and congestion.

Fantastic way to travel and makes it so much more convenient.

> But this is not an inherent property of cars. It is only true because we invested all our transit dollars in highways. Cars are not inherently better and roads are not free. If we invest more in public transit we can reduce our need for cars.

Personal modes of transport like cars and bicycles give you more degrees of freedom compared to public/shared modes with respect to:

a) space (can go to more places point to point)

b) time (travel any time)

c) privacy

Maybe this is true but I’m not convinced “more degrees of freedom” is a useful metric here. It’s not as simple as three bullet points - there is an entire infrastructure that must be built up around cars and that infrastructure has serious problems of cost and land use.

But if you like bullet points, cars are:

a) expensive to operate

b) dangerous to pedestrians

c) more polluting than trains or bicycles

Now I don’t actually think this form of argument is comprehensive but you see that we can easily pull out pluses and negatives without taking a holistic view.

If it is self-evident that bullet trains and their infra are superior to cars and their infra (as your response implies), what are the reasons you think bullet trains have not spread?

That isn't an externality, that's just the direct function of a car.

>NOT including the positives that exists due to constructing infrastructure around that mode of transportation

This is what this statement was trying to address. If we built everything around using ziplines we couldn't go "OF COURSE ziplines provide a net positive." That'd be an incredibly silly statement.

Being by far the most convenient way to travel from home to pretty much any random location.

Speaking from the Netherlands with a relatively good public transit system.

That's not an externality. That's what you pay for.

Other people, not just you, also benefit from your increase in flexibility.

Do they? I guess occasionally my family and a few friends benefit when we can meet somewhere they haven't bothered to support with proper public transport. I'm not sure I'd class that as an externality.

It's not the most convenient because of cars. It's more that the other options are less convenient because of cars.

A huge boost to economic productivity and growth by increasing the flexibility of land usage, for example.

Cars are terrible for land usage. Car infrastructure takes up much more space than alternative transit infrastructure options.

Minimizing road surface area and the like is not a very important issue compared to the land usage flexibility cars bring.

It’s not just roads, it’s parking lots. Our most valuable land in cities is covered in huge swaths of asphalt instead of dense urban housing. This is a poor use of land. It didn’t even used to be this way. We knocked down buildings in cities in the mid century to make more room to park cars.

Roads of course are useful for economic activity, but we’ve gone so hard in to roads that every person has to have their own car. If we put more commuters on trains, we could still have roads for trucks and other things that don’t work well for trains. But with every person needing a car, way too much land gets swallowed by parking and road infrastructure.

I am a person that has actively chosen to live without a car, despite work in automotive industry. Recently I wanted to take my vintage computer in a large crate, to a LAN meeting, but I would not be able to transport it without a car. Which forced me to order a taxi, which is a car for hire... I maybe could have been fine with a cargo bike, but it would not be satisyingly safe for me or the cargo. I have also heard the perspective of children safety. When they need to be transported to a communal education center, it is said to be much safer and convenient to put them in a large, crashproof car, than stuffing them in a bicycle trolley while it is raining.

How is having to move something a problem? Nobody is saying they never have a place. But is it reasonable for you to purchase, maintain, and store a large expensive object that pollutes just for some moving? No. It's better to have a system that helps you when needed but doesn't produce as much waste per person. The taxi isn't a problem.

What do you mean by crashproof car? Those words don't go together. Even a little.

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